30 Fantastic Statistical Facts That’ll Make You Go WTF

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1Battle of Britain

Battle of Britain

Britain had more planes at the end of the Battle of Britain than at the beginning because they were being made at such an incredible rate that it surpassed the losses.


2. Gary Numan is 13 days older than Gary Oldman.


3. The 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk. Variants include the 1-9-90 rule (sometimes 90–9–1 principle or the 89:10:1 ratio), which states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only view content, 9% of the participants edit content, and 1% of the participants actively create new content.


4. If none of Wayne Gretzky's goals counted, his assists would still make him the all-time leading scorer in the NHL.


5. If a woman has no daughter, she has broken the chain of direct lineage of women that goes all the way back to the beginning of the human race. The same thing goes for Men without sons.


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6Civil War

Civil War

More US Soldiers died in the Civil War than US Soldiers have died in all other wars ever, combined.


7. Atheists, agnostics and the irreligious are growing as a group in America. Currently, about 25% of Americans say they are unaffiliated with any religion, including 35% of Millennials.


8. The oldest person on Earth (Jeanne Calment) has lived on the planet with an entirely different population of people.


9. 29% of California’s air pollution is from China.


10. Hold up your hands and clap them together. Wait one second, then do it again. If you could plot the distance between the first clap and the second clap, it would be more than 800 kilometers. This is because the Earth is moving around the sun, the sun is moving around the center of the galaxy, the galaxy is moving through the Virgo Supercluster, and the Virgo Supercluster is barreling through the universe. When you add up all the velocities and compare the result to the cosmic microwave background (which is the closest thing we have to a universal frame of reference), it comes out to about 800 kilometers per second. In the time it took you to read this, you've traveled farther than you'll ever walk in your life.


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11Wedlock

Wedlock

If you graduate high school, don't have a child out of wedlock, and are able to hold a job for a year, you most likely will become fairly successful.


12. Sharks are older than trees. Sharks are at least 400 million years old, trees are sitting at 350 million years.


13. The average person is a 28-year-old Chinese man.


14. The Vatican has 5 Popes per square mile.


15. More Mexicans are leaving the U.S. than coming to the U.S.


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16Texas

Texas

If all the humans alive right now lived in the same density per square mile as New York City, we could all live in the state of Texas.


17. By almost all important measures, the world is a better place to live today than at any other time in human history.


18. If you correctly shuffle a deck of cards, you'll create a configuration that has never existed, and likely never will again. This is because there are 8.1x10^67 possible arrangements for fifty-two cards, and getting through each of them would take longer than the lifespan of the universe. It also turns out that the above statistics are a little bit scarier than many people realize. According to the mathematics of the situation, as many as 91.5% of Solitaire games should be winnable... and yet, in spite of this, people who have actually played the game report that only 8% of games result in a win. Given that shuffling a deck of cards almost always results in a new configuration, and given that approximately 90% of those configurations should result in a winning game of Solitaire, we're forced to conclude that somehow, we're seeing less than 5% of the available configurations for a deck of cards. By a strange coincidence, it turns out that less than 5% of the universe comprises normal matter and energy. The rest of it is dark matter and dark energy. What does this mean? It means that when you shuffle a deck of cards, you're only going to wind up with observable configurations. 95% of that 8.1x10^67 can be classified as "dark configurations." However, mathematically speaking, the more you shuffle a deck of cards, the more likely it is that you'll stumble on one of those "dark configurations." In other words, it's only a matter of time before someone answers some major astrophysics questions using only a deck of cards.


19. If you're in a group of 23 people, there's a 50% chance that 2 of them share a birthday. If you're in a group of 70 people, that probability jumps to over 99%.


20. 3% of everyone on earth alive in 1939 died in World War 2.


21Newspaper

Newspaper

If you look at a webpage/ newspaper/ book and find a random number, there's a 30% chance that it will start with a "1".


22. Over 80% of sexually active people will contract an STD (permanent or temporarily) at some point, but most won't know it because they won't show any symptoms.


23. Wearing a seatbelt correctly reduces chance of front seat passenger fatality due to front end collision by 45%. Seat belts save lives. Also airbags are more likely to cause injuries rather than prevent them when seat belts are not worn.


24. Everyone was the youngest person alive for a brief moment after their birth.


25. The richest 1% person in the world have more wealth than the rest of the planet. The world's 8 richest men have as much money as the poorest half, 3.6 billion people.

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